Legacy of the Void Beta: Balance Update Preview – August 20

We have a significant balance update today for Legacy of the Void. Many of you may already know what’s coming from interacting with us and providing feedback via our weekly community feedback updates, but for those who want a breakdown of all the changes and why we’re making them, you can find all the details below! Please remember that none of these changes are final, and we are eager to hear your thoughts before and after you play with these changes.

Macro mechanics changes:

Spawn Larva is reduced to 2 per injection, and set to autocast by default
M.U.L.E. is removed
Chrono Boost is removed

As we’ve been discussing over the past few weeks, we’d like to try out these changes on a larger scale. We are aware that these changes may present the need for balance tuning in other areas, so it would be great if everyone can keep this in mind while testing. For example, this type of feedback: “removing Chrono Boost was bad because Blink now takes unreasonably long” isn’t very useful because changing research and build time is easy if we determine that the Chrono Boost change is good.

Due to the Chrono Boost removal, we’re also adding the following buffs to help Protoss in the early game:

Warpgate research time reduced to 140, from 160
Disruptor build reduced to 50, from 60
Added one additional supply to Nexus

Cyclone

Anti-air attack reinstated, but damage is reduced
Damage against ground units is reduced
Removed current upgrades and replaced with one which greatly increases Lock On damage against both air and ground units

The main goal for the Cyclone is to have them counter air units early on, but not to the point that you can’t go air against Terran like we saw early on in the beta. In late-game scenarios, due to their reasonable speed, range, and damage against all unit types, it has not been uncommon to see armies almost exclusively consisting of Cyclones. We also wanted to hit this a bit hard so that in the late game, Cyclones can be good but not to the point that they’re the only unit needed.

Zealot Charge upgrade

Speed bonus is reset to Heart of the Swarm levels
Charge deals 30 damage on hit

We want to have a clear difference between Zealots and Adepts. We believe Adepts are more effective than Zealots in large, extended engagements. Therefore, we wanted to look for a change that would make Zealots clearly better in harassment situations. However, because Zealot burst damage will be effective in direct engagements as well, we’ll be monitoring exactly when Zealots outperform Adepts and vice-versa.

Warpgate

Warping in at Pylons takes 16 seconds
Pylon power is buffed when touching a Nexus or a Warpgate
Warping in takes 2 seconds in this case
Warping in takes 2 seconds from Warp Prisms

Due to the results we’ve had internally, we’d like to test this rather large change and see if it’s good for the game. We initially believe that the buff to defensive situations is good because Protoss is currently struggling to keep up with expansions as the game enters the mid-to-late game. Also, while 16 seconds on offense may be too big of a nerf, we’d really love to try out this more extreme number just to be able to quickly test the side effects of this change.

The current upgrade for Medivacs is too big of an upgrade to the in-combat cases. We want to try out a buff that mostly affects the harassment and retreat cases. We’ll see how this new upgrade goes before we make a call on what to do in this area going forward.

Disruptor Redesign:

Disruptors now shoot out a ball of energy that can be manually controlled.
This energy ball blows up after a few seconds, dealing high damage.
Disruptor invulnerability removed. Energy balls are invulnerable.
If the Disruptor is killed, the energy ball fizzles dealing no damage.

As we mentioned briefly at gamescom, we’ve completed redesigned the Disruptor into a unit that fires explosive weapons into the enemy lines. This new version has been working out very well for us. It has the core, awesome part of the Disruptor in the beta (its ability to have micro on both sides in engagements where Disruptors are used), and now has a change that opens up more counter opportunities.

Enemy Spawn location display increased from 10 seconds to 25 seconds

We heard your feedback about the potential enemy spawn location display being too short right now, so we’ve tried to strike a balance where it doesn’t stay up too long, but players have enough time to check when they aren’t busy at the start of games. We’d like to try out 25 seconds for now and see how that feels.